Ringling College’s BOAD Program Features Creativity@Work Series

UPDATE: Please visit the BOAD page for the most current information on the Creativity@Work series.

Ringling College’s BOAD Program Features Creativity@Work Series April 13, 2010 – In the past year, Ringling College of Art and Design has hosted many business executives and creative leaders from high-end, well-respected companies - all as part of the new BOAD (Business of Art and Design) program's Creativity@Work Series and Visiting Creative Leaders program.

Dr. Wanda Chaves, Lead Faculty for the BOAD program, started both the Creativity@Work series and the Visiting Creative Leaders program to bring a professional point of view and expertise to Ringling College students in order to prepare them for real-life working environments.

The Creativity@Work series selects top level executives and creative professionals from high-end companies to come to Ringling College and give presentations, not only to the BOAD class, but to the campus as well. These professionals present about their work experiences and current projects, as well as give advice and information about their industry.

The Visiting Creative Leaders program, an extension of the Creativity@Work series, was created to showcase the expertise of visiting artists and top creative professionals by having them not just visit, but stay on campus for a short “residency” (4 days, a week, or 2 weeks) to work hands-on with students on various projects and give a series of lectures in classes and to the campus.

To date, the program has already seen presentations and hands-on learning by speakers from Disney, Cirque du Soleil, Nickelodeon, Etsy, MoonBot, MTV, DreamWorks, and many more.

There have been two Visiting Creative Leaders during Spring semester 2010: David Grad, from MTV, and Kathy Altieri, from DreamWorks. Below is a recap from their visits:

David Grad, an Executive Producer from MTV in NY City, worked with a group of students from various majors. David is recreating his MTV teams here on campus. Students were assigned to a Project Management team and a Creative Team. The teams worked with David in class and then spent a Saturday with him working together to develop a promotion very similar to the promotions that he and his teams create to be aired on the MTV channel.

Kathy Altieri, a Production Designer from DreamWorks, did a series of talks in the BOAD classes and for the campus. Kathy just finished working on How to Train Your Dragon, DreamWorks' most recent 3D movie. Below are the topics she discussed:

(a) Managing Change: the Real Story Behind How to Train Your Dragon Over the course of four years, they worked with three different sets of directors on three completely different ideas of what the story should be. Our last set of directors, Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, joined them with just over a year to go before release and completely re-vamped the story and characters. This class covered the range of visuals and artistic choices that were made along the way and discussed how they managed, creatively, the changes being asked for from an artistic, as well as business (financial), standpoint.

(b) Primadonnas, Powerhouses, and Mice: Managing Your CreativesThis workshop explored leadership principles (and some secrets) for working in a creative business: How artists are managed in a large studio environment; successes and failures and plenty of true stories (the names were changed to protect the guilty).

(c) The Creative Process: How to Generate a Large Body of Ideas and How to Tell When They Work Creativity is a mystery that beckons most of us, perhaps because of the hope that we will be able to touch the Great Infinite Source and channel true genius. For most of us, though, we have to beg, borrow and steal to get started and then do a lot of hard work. This course discussed the creative process as seen through the eyes of artists, dancers, writers, and others who have had to come up with “something that’s never been seen before.”

Past Speakers Over the past year, these speakers have visited our campus to give presentations or hands-on learning to Ringling students: